Political Quotes

On the recordDecember 6, 2017
Next week is the fifth-year anniversary of the horrific shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. For a brief moment, it looked like we would actually honor those victims by voting on a bill that would improve background checks to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals, but we should never have gotten our hopes up. There is one winner in the House, and it is the gun lobby. The majority has combined the background check bill with a bill that helps move forward the gun lobby's ultimate agenda: gutting States' gun laws. This bill forces every State to accept the concealed carry laws of every other State, including the 12 States that don't even require a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public, even into a school. Let's take one example of the dangerousness of this bill. A woman in an abusive relationship is five times more likely to be killed by her abuser if there is a gun involved. Let that sink in: bringing a gun into an abusive situation means the chances of a woman dying increases by 500 percent. So it makes all the sense in the world that, if this Congress were interested in public safety, saving lives, curbing gun deaths, that we would be talking about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people. But that is not what is happening here. We are talking about a bill that invites domestic abusers to buy a gun in a State with lax laws and legally carry that gun into any other State.…
Said by
Katherine Clark
Democratic · Massachusetts

Share

More from Katherine Clark

Jul 15, 2026

The status quo is not tenable. We should not provide a blank check for military aid to any country that does not comply with U.S. law, interests, and values.

rollcall.com
Mar 3, 2025

It's not just numbers in a budget, it's families.

cbsnews.com
Nov 11, 2025

I mean, shutdowns are terrible, and of course there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.

theatlantic.com
Feb 6, 2024

We all agree that something needs to be done to fix our broken immigration system, but when it comes to doing the work, finding the solutions, House Democrats have come to the table, President Biden has come to the table, and the Senate…

govinfo.gov

Other voices in this conversation